AlteredStateBlob

It’s fine. The PCI-e is another one for a graphics card that requires more connectors to be attached.

I mean, they’re profitable for the first time since 2018. Not least thanks to a huge amount of cost cutting the past two or three years. This is more of that.

I was donating until I got an email telling me to donate more signed by their CEO or something who earns a couple hundred thousand a year.

Mind, I wasn’t opted into communcation like that. Only updates and news this was neither. If their new CEO cleans house and refocuses as they said they will, I will consider renewing my donations again.

Recently saw a video of a German train driver who is also suffering from this nonsense and sometimes has difficulties seeing signage, etc.

Possibly. It’s entirely opaque where I work. I have no clue how they’re compensated whatsoever. We managed to fix it for the most part. I like the customer satisfaction approach via renewals as a target. Especially since you can basically give that to everyone involved on the project. Then again, some customers are dissatisfied as a policy. Worked with some miserable folk who always communicated in a horrible, horrible way but kept renewing and never balked at the cost. It was simply a “you’re a service provider, you’re beneath us” thing. Some people truly suck.

I once had a sales-bro tell the client we’d “monitor the internet for X”. That has remained one of the most important hammers for me to wield when discussions even start coming up. How the fuck does one “monitor the internet” to a degree that fits the clients interpretation of this phrase. Sales guy is still with us and a good lad, he owns that mistake. But fuck was it ever crazy.

We’ve decoupled timelines from estimates almost entirely and to the ire of all our sales and C-Level only give out Quarter based estimates anymore. “End of Q3 or early Q4”. When we deliver mid Q3, everyone is happy. The funny bit is that since we’ve made these changes, we’ve not noticed any drop in client interest at all. What we do notice is that we actually ship what we promise (sometimes even more). We also don’t have clients who think we’ll do 10 hours of work for free anymore, because we’ve anchored the value of every little bit we do properly. We also filter the stingy clients who are completely pointless and are just wasting our time, while engaged with our competitors.

There’s a lot, a looooot of FOMO in sales on the side of our own sales people. So they lowball their shit to make sure we close. Then we can’t keep what’s promised and nobody is happy and contracts that would only be profitable after like 3 years don’t get renewed and we lose a client. Great stuff. Then try and get them back after a shitty experience like that.

The mind boggles.

Thank you, I’m sure trying. I got a good 30-35 years left in this, I’d rather not be miserable or make people miserable for the duration.

Hate this. I work as a PO. Praise my devs every chance I get both internally and towards our clients. Always pass on positive feedback and use negative feedback only translated into priority weights.

I see my job as keeping stakeholders at bay and let them do their job. I bundle requests into feature requests that cover as many current and future needs as possible, but never without internal meetings first.

Just getting sales to stop making deals on feature requirements with clients was a very long uphill battle that we have mostly won. Now it all goes through my team first and we always do estimates with our development teams. Takes a bit of time, takes a bit longer, but never have I seen a client get back to us with the same urgency as they request a quote anyway. If they can not wait a week, they won’t be a good fit for what we are doing and how we do things.

Posts like these make me feel accomplished :D

I am om the product side of things and have created some basic proof of concept tools with AI that my bosses wanted to sell off. No way no how will I be able to sevrice or maintain them. It’s incredibly impressive that I could even get this output.

I am not saying it won’t become possible, but I lack the fundamental knowledge and understanding to make anything beyond the most minor adjustments and AI is still wuite bad at only addressing specific issues or, good forbid, expanding code, without fully rewriting the whole thing and breaking everything else.

For our devs I see it as a much improved and less snide stackoverflow and Google. The direct conversational nature really speeds things up with boilerplate code and since they actually know what they are doing, it’s amazing. Not only that but we had devs copy paste from online searches withoout fully understanding the snippets. Now the AI can explain it in context.

Hier muss das Gesetz angepasst werden, wenn dieses Urteil aufrecht gehalten wird von höheren Instanzen.

You’re correct, Australia played a big role in it, and the EU was passing regulation around 2015 on that issue as well. So they got slapped around in Australia and changed it up before getting slapped around in the EU.

Their refund policy is due to getting slapped around in EU courts, not because valve is benevolent or anything. I do like steam a lot, but it is a near monopoly which acts as DRM to a degree. They did and would abuse that power unless regulated.

Exactly. Steam didn’t invest in marketing nonsense and gimmicks to get people on their platform. For consumers it is simply the superior product, DRM not withstanding.

They got their issues, no doubt. But I have never seen a quasi monopoly be more consumer oriented than steam.

Tja

Imperor - mostly long videos playing and teaching Paradox games (currently mainly Crusader Kings 3), but the guy has that kind of voice I like to have just running in the background for comfort, so that works out. Recently started to do some interesting DND/TTRPG stuff as well like little guides for DMs and even quests to put into games. Also looks at smaller games from time to time during steam next fests and such.

I sure hope the courts toss that thing. It would be the single worst violation of peoples privacy since the internet became a thing. It’s incredible that lobbyists and police unions have this much impact on policy creation.

Thanks for the long response. I was thinking Mint maybe, had some experience with it a few years ago. But it’d replace both my private and work stuff over, so some gaming, too (mainly through steam). Stability is key to me. My current Windows install hasn’t needed anything for 4 years or so, so I’m absolutely not going for Arch. I need this stuff daily, I cannot waste time trying to troubleshoot for hours or relying on backups, etc.

I mean, I’d like to. But some of my work requires me to use stuff like Adobe products and I find it massively easier to keep up to date with what these tools can do, if I can just muck around in my private projects (I actually care about) and then transfer the knowledge to my work stuff. I’ll mull the idea some more time. Not really interested in dual booting at all, though that might be a solid solution, but windows simply deciding to kill everything else, even if its on a different disk entirely is not a prospect I relish.

More and more I am considering taking a vacation with the specific goal of migrating to Linux. I’ve got decades old workflows linked to certain programs and tools that I know for sure only exist in Windows, so I’ll likely have to still run it in a VM for those, but my system setup is just kinda the place I call home the most, yet my patience for all this nonsense is rapidly declining.